Toxic cityscape, slow violence, and necropolitics: “Storied” air in Animal’s People and Moth Smoke

Abstract

Drawing on references from material ecocriticism, Rob Nixon’s idea of slow violence, and Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, this paper foregrounds the intersection between air injustice among economically marginalized postcolonial subjects and slow violence-triggered disease and decay. It explicates how South Asia has been positioned as a site of air vulnerability and air inequality in the age of the Anthropocene. It argues that the ‘storied’ atmosphere in Animal’s People by Indra Sinha and Moth Smoke by Mohsin Hamid can serve both as a text and a context to acknowledge the crucial omnipresence of air and its dynamic agency, warning humanity not to take air for granted as an invisible and hollow force.